Blueprint Games (Fall 2023)

Your Task

Today, you will assume the role of a Blueprint developer. You and your team will work together to define project goals, deliverables, and features for a nonprofit, assuming you have ten weeks to implement your plan.

Don't worry — you won’t be writing any code today. Instead, your team will focus on understanding and discussing product needs, outlining key features, planning high-level user flows, and modeling your initial database needs. If you don't understand every part of the prompt, that's okay. Ask your team members for help! This exercise is as much about your ability to collaborate as it is about your ability to work towards completing the task.

🥁 Drumroll… Introducing the nonprofit you’ll be working with today…

Hoboken Family Planning Clinic

The Hoboken Family Planning first opened its doors for service on March 1, 1972. For over 40 years we have gained the trust and confidence of our patients and community by providing quality care to people with a wide range of backgrounds; from the uninsured to the underinsured, to Medicaid recipients and the fully insured in Hoboken and neighboring communities. Our main goal is to continue to provide education and services to help people manage their reproductive health, find chronic diseases, diagnose and treat sexually transmitted diseases and discover cancers at early and treatable stages.

—**http://www.hobfamplan.org/**

The Challenge

The clinic serves a significant population of undocumented mothers whose primary language is Spanish. Unfortunately, many of them are unaware of the free or affordable services offered by the clinic. The objective is to reach and serve this underserved demographic, regardless of their immigration status. There are three physical clinics located in Hoboken, Summit Center, and West New York. These clinics offer essential services such as pregnancy support, STI testing, and cancer screenings, covering a quarter of the entire state's needs, often at little to no cost.

The proposed project aims to introduce crucial features that will simplify individuals' access to the clinic's resources. These features will encompass an event management platform, real-time event updates, and easily comprehensible educational health resources.

The Goal

Your mission is to create an inclusive platform that not only raises awareness but also provides support to the clinic's existing patients.

The Users

Individuals who make use of the Clinic’s services
Hoboken Family Clinic Administrators
Clinic Physicians

Getting started

When Blueprint partners with a nonprofit, they describe the challenge they’re facing, and we’re free to decide how to tackle it. Today, you’re in Blueprint’s place. How you choose to approach this prompt is entirely up to you and your team. Just make sure you can provide solid justifications for your decisions. There’s no right answer—everything has tradeoffs.

Here are some questions to get you started.

What kind of system do you think would fit best? Is it an app, a website? Or is it something else entirely?
Consider the profile of a typical user. Are there any considerations that should be made when designing a new system for said user? How might these considerations affect the final deliverable?
What features would be most valuable to the nonprofit and its end-users?
How can you make sure it's feasible for your team to complete within the ten weeks?
What should you focus on? What might you have to sacrifice?

When you’re ready to get started, open this Google Drive folder and duplicate the Google Doc titled “Design Doc Template.” The doc contains a few tips on how to take notes.

Deliverables

You will not be asked to present your final deliverables. We are more interested in seeing how you go about understanding and breaking down the problem than any polished final result.

Document any thoughts, drawings, or features as you work! At the end, you will submit everything your team has come up with.

That said, we aren't looking to see a beautiful polished design doc — we're most interested in your process, so feel free to include in-progress work and notes, and don't fret about the formatting.

Your team will submit the design doc (created earlier) which can include any artifacts you create or use throughout this process. This can include:

brainstorming notes
sketches
screenshots or links to design mockups
links to online sources

Tips

Helpful process to go about designing apps

What features are most important?
What information/data you need to build those features?
How should this information/data be represented, and how much of that information is shown to users?
What is the flow each user takes in order to access and manipulate this information?
What would the screens look like to the users?

Understanding the end user

How can we build in a way that creates an app that is accessible, simple to use, and easy to understand?